Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Wii)

It's two, two, two games in one: action fantasy for kids and serious depth for adults.
7/29/2008 9:08 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god. Another dang dungeon crawler -- and a sweet-as-guava-nectar one at that? I know what you're thinking because I pray it every night: "Dear Sweet Father of Mario, and Cid Even, Protect Us From Undue Repetition in Games. Lead Us Not Into Dungeons We've Crawled Before. And Deliver Us From Drivel. Amen."

Yet there's something different about Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon for the Wii, and perhaps it has a little bit to do with its unrelenting cuteness.

First, to a grim hell full of hooked spikes placed strategically in the butt to the drone at Game Informer who gave it a bad score. Sure, the game has its issues, which I'll get to, but the cheery surprise is this: Chocobo, the oversized chicken, is so adorable, you want to play as poultry. Heck, this proud young bird who hasn't leveled up is so needy-looking, I'd protect him from a drooling Colonel Sanders and Frank Perdue with my very life. (Honestly, I'm surprised Square doesn't put him in a platformer.)

Yet because the game's E10+-rated, and because this fowl has those googly, popping Chocobo eyes, I expected to zip through what I first considered to be child-poop of the smelliest kind in a matter of hours. It took me a lot longer than that, and I expect it will for you, as well. For if you're not strategizing like a young Clay Felker on deadline day at New York, you iz big-time dead, Pogo. Step into battle incorrectly and it's, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The opening of the game is a mixed blessing, kind of an amalgam of the kid who tells a joke a tad wrong and an old-ass adult who tells the story over and over. The first thing you see is a montage of every plot point in the game (including a baby that looks like Little Green Sprout, the Jolly Green Giant's spritely protégé, and a disturbing scene that looks like illegal sex but is really a moment of tender comfort). Then, in the opening credits, you see the same thing, only longer. I mean, the movie and montage are fine cinematically, but it looks like Square is complimenting itself before there's any reason to do so.

So Cid and Chocobo as treasure hunters are rolling through the desert, minding their own business. Suddenly, they find themselves in the territory of Memoria in a town called Lostime. In the town square, there's long-winded, badly-synced dialogue on the part of the town's mayor, a portly, double-chinned "Wizard of Oz"-looking fellow who spews some dangerous but significant rhetoric. "If we forget about it, we never needed it ... Forgetting everything is the key to the future" -- which, if you think about it, sounds like the Bush Administration's mantra for governing. Lostime's mayor's comment is pretty darn Orwellian-subversive in an "Animal Farm" and "1984" kind of way.

And that's what makes Chocobo's Dungeon that rare game that can be appreciated by kids and adults alike: Like the fear of technology within the love story in "Wall-E", it works on a gee-that's-f'in'-smart and an oh-see-the-funny-anthopomorph level.